The present invention generally relates to the updating of a domain name system (DNS) configuration, and more specifically, to updating a DNS configuration in a local area network (LAN).
Nowadays, there is an overwhelming growth of network users with many usages such as uploading, downloading, telecommunicating distributed information and more advanced professional distributed computing, etc. Many LANs are built in social organizations such as companies and colleges for sharing local resources and establishing distributed computation. In a modern information-explosion society, such network infrastructures are working everyday everywhere to accomplish many computation tasks.
A LAN may often suffer some hardware or manmade issues that may cause the whole LAN or certain LAN members to reboot frequently. When a LAN member reboots, either a static Internet protocol (IP) address or a dynamic IP address may be assigned to the LAN member that is being rebooted.
As for the static IP address, an IP address is fixedly assigned to a terminal apparatus or other LAN member. When the terminal apparatus reboots, its IP address is unchanged. However, this manner of assigning IP addresses does not efficiently use limited IP resources. In addition, even a static IP address may be changed after network reconfiguration.
In the case of the dynamic IP address, an IP address is only assigned to an apparatus actively connected to the network. For example, the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) allows enterprises and Internet service providers (ISPs) to automatically assign an address to a computer when it is powered-on. This helps to save usable address space since not all apparatuses are actively used at any one time and they may be assigned with IP addresses as needed.
Regardless of which manner is used to assign an IP address, when a rebooted terminal apparatus has a new IP address that is different from its original IP address, this will cause reconnection failures in distributed programs and will also cause a lot of efforts to establish new recognition between LAN members. Common solutions for this are to manually obtain a new IP address, or to acquire a new IP address of a terminal apparatus by searching, for example, a hostname or description thereof. However, these solutions have a risk of mismatching since all the related information is not constant.
Of course, a centralized DNS server can be used to perform refreshing of IP addresses and to convert between an IP address and a domain name. However, it is expensive to dispose a DNS server in LAN environment.